My Southern Journey (13 page)

I am glad such places survive, for I doubt seriously if I will get through this life without a few more bad days. I can’t even get through McIntosh.

THE IMPOSSIBLE TURKEY

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: November 2011

I
am going to write a letter to the editor of this magazine. I am going to type with ill intent, use all the wicked prepositions and strident punctuation I know, and give these people a piece of my mind. If gas were not $19 a gallon, I’d drive to corporate headquarters and get ugly. I mean it—somebody hold me back.

I would not be this upset on my own behalf. But these people have hurt my mama’s feelings. And not just this year. This has been going on for decades, right about this time every holiday season.

It has to do with turkeys. My people cook the best turkey in the whole turkey-eating world. “It’s tender, and it tastes good,” said my mama, who, with my Aunt Jo and Uncle John, have cooked 99% of the turkeys I have consumed. That should be enough. It is enough.

I start to think about it around this time of year, every year. I start to visualize it. For about four decades, they used the same pan, the one Aunt Jo won in a raffle at Coleman’s Service Station in Jacksonville, Alabama. The bird, usually furnished by someone’s employer in lieu of an actual cash bonus during the holidays, came from the oven half submerged in butter and juices, and cooked—because we country people are terrified of half-done poultry—through and through. And then cooked maybe a few
minutes longer, just to be sure. That bird naturally tended to fall apart, but since it fell into butter, no one really cared.

I never even thought about what they looked like. To me, to us, they were beautiful. Then, it happened. Two years ago, Mama stood looking at another thoroughly cooked, wonderfully seasoned, heavenly aromatic bird, and sighed. “Well,” she said, “it don’t look like the ones on the magazine.” She meant the almost annual spread of an immaculate turkey in
Southern Living.

Those turkeys were, to be honest, things of beauty. They were luscious, plump, and cosmetically perfect. They were not just browned, they were golden brown. The skin was unbroken, wing to wing, leg to leg, gizzard to...well, where they hide the giblets. Sometimes, they even wore little white turkey booties on the end of drumsticks. (I am sure those things have a name, but danged if I know what it is, and I wouldn’t admit it if I did.)

It was as if the turkey was actually posing, posing on an impeccable tabletop, with real cranberries sprinkled around. I told my mama her turkey was beautiful, because it was, and always will be. I told her not to give those tarted-up show turkeys another thought.

Then, we feasted. There was cornbread dressing, the best I have ever had—my Aunt Jo always says she ruined it with this mistake or that mistake, but it is always perfect, dense, the kind of thing you can cut a slice from at one o’clock in the morning two days later and eat cold, all by itself. There were the best mashed potatoes in the universe, and pinto beans, seasoned with big chunks of ham. There were hot biscuits and cabbage and carrot slaw—because country people do not celebrate anything worth celebrating without slaw—and cranberry sauce, the kind that makes a sucking sound as it slides out of the can. (We do not abide any cranberry sauce that does not make a noise.) There were green beans, pulled from the garden and canned by my mama months before, and my favorite thing of all, a kind of creamed onion, cooked slowly in an iron skillet in bacon grease, softened by adding water. And, in case we were a tad short of carbohydrates, there was a big pot of macaroni and cheese.

My Uncle John said grace, with the dignity of ages. My mother’s beautiful turkey always falls off the bone. I eat a leg, and then a wing, unless my shirt buttons start to pop off. It will be that way this year. It will be that way forever, because it has to be.

Now forgive me. I have a letter to write.

HONOR THY MATRIARCH

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: June 2015

D
eviled eggs always make me want to cry.

It happened again the other day, when my mother told me, “Look in the ’frigerator, hon, and see what we got,” and inside was a platter with about a hundred deviled eggs. I ate two standing up in the yellow glow of the open door, and then went where no one could see me, in case I made a fool of myself.

It’s not that I cry over deviled eggs, themselves. They trigger a memory hard to live with, even after all this time. As my people would say, “some things just stand for things.”

You will see when I am done.

My grandmother, Ava, was our matriarch, but not in that solid, steel magnolia way you think about with Southern women. She suffered from mild dementia early, and in her old age suffered more. She required someone to watch over her.

Yet every June, on her birthday, the whole clan gathered in her backyard to celebrate a life, to pay respect as she sat in her lawn chair in the shade of the hardwood trees. I can still see her, hair bound in a turban of some kind of manmade silk, pale blue eyes seeing nothing, everything, behind thick, yellowed glasses that had not been adjusted since Pearl Harbor. There was always a child on her knee. She could not, as she failed, be trusted to be by herself, but she could be trusted with a child.

They honored her for what she had been, for the fact she lost a baby in the Great Depression from simple dehydration, in a time when poor people died from such things, but she saved seven others, saved them by doing without, herself. They honored her because she stuck by a husband who was a good man in almost every way, but drank, and the bottle took him down. And when he died she lost a little bit of her mind.

They honored her for living through. They came in Vietnam-era Chevrolets and work trucks that rattled with logging chains and, in a few, rusted beer cans that had drowned sorrows they could no longer recall. This was a celebration, so grown-ups came in church clothes, though it was Alabama in summer so the men did leave their shirttails out. They came bearing fried chicken cooked in iron skillets and potato salad that did not come from a plastic tub. The Georgia people, as our kin across the state line were called, brought cases of Double Cola, which we considered exotic since you could not get them west of Carrollton. And three or four of the best cooks on this earth brought deviled eggs, speckled with black pepper or cayenne. It was the only time we had them, and so they always make me, as foolish as it is, and as I am, a little sad.

It is not just that I miss her. She has been gone for decades now. It is the fact that, as she failed, I rarely went to see her. I lived from a duffel bag, always moving. I chased selfish things, chased prizes that, now, shine no more than the folded-up pieces of Juicy Fruit wrapper that the old woman used to hide, like jewels, in her room.

Things stand for things.

REQUIEM FOR A FISH SANDWICH

Garden & Gun
, August/September 2014

I
love fishing stories, which some people equate with lies. I do not believe this is always true. I think weird things happen when you step boldly off firmer earth, and commence to float. This is my new favorite.

Jimbo Meador, outdoorsman, writer, and other things, was fishing the Yucatán about forty years ago. Not far away, a tiny man, a Mayan he believes, was fishing with a hand line from a tiny boat. Suddenly, the tiny man and his tiny boat went shooting across the water. The tiny boat did not have a motor.

He had hooked a Goliath grouper, and it was taking him for a ride.

“Like
The Old Man and the Sea,
” said Meador’s friend Skip Jones, who grew up, like Meador, not far from Mobile Bay.

The tiny man hung on, and on, and on.

Finally, he had his prize, and got the weary fish, hundreds of pounds of it, back to the dock.

The tiny man ran a rope through the grouper’s massive maw and gills. “Tied it to a post,” Meador said, like a horse.

There was no electricity there, no ice. So they tied the live fish to the dock to swim, to keep, till they decided it was time to eat.

Meador told it at lunchtime over fried chicken, since there was no grouper to be had. As the story hung in the air, as all good
stories will, I was not thinking of hot weather in exotic places, or fish fights, or Hemingway.

I pictured a five-gallon bucket of tartar sauce, and a hundred hamburger buns.

Just how many sandwiches, I wondered, would that big ol’ boy have made?

But it seems all the great grouper stories are old stories, now. The Goliath grouper, fished relentlessly, is a protected species, other types of big grouper have been sorely depleted, and the grouper sandwich seems, sometimes, more like a dream.

I remember a recent birthday when all I wanted was a grouper sandwich. It was late summer, ninety-five degrees in the descending dusk. I had been waiting for two hours; you should not wait two hours for anything in this life except surgery, and at least then they have the decency to knock you out. As I waited, I sat on a hard bench in the humidity and watched children play in dingy sand and scream, which is to say they mostly just screamed. One little boy was flinging sand—I think it was mostly dirt—high in the air.